well its nearly easter...and more importantly its nearly flip flop weather!!!

Blog is due tomorrow and fingers crossed it will work - it works on my computer but bloody technology these days - i couldn't view it at uni the other day and freaked out - turns out the text colour was too light - it refuses to change to black(i have no clue why!) so i apologize for your impending eye strain from reading my ramblings! i cant find where the "blog followers" code bit has disappeared to, its somewhere in the HTML code but because ive edited the skin so much and change so much around i can't figure it all out, so yeah thats why there is no followers link. i tried adding jamie's blog link but it wouldn't let me access, so i eventually gave up! i will continue this blog into next year so after its marked ill sort it then.

but anyway enough of the complaints/excuses! ive loved doing the blog its a fabulous idea - especially for some one like me who cant spell for toffee - oh i apologies in advance for my spelling mistakes and grammar errors - not my strongest point!LOL! spell checker is a godsend!

its nice to look back on, you can edit it, add pictures, videos its brilliant. i would have hated having to do a written based journal and we have so many different papers, handouts, sketch books and folders its nice to do something different!

Busy week this week. my toile review is friday.

im really not happy with my design. the jumpsuit ive designed has gathered pockets on the waist. having constructed the main base of the jumpsuit ive pinned on the pockets and they just dont lie correctly on the bodice, it looks stupid. there's no tutors around but along with some of the other girls in the class whose opinion i asked, ive decided to change it.  one of my other designs is very similar it contains the same style lines but includes a waist belt instead of the pockets and the shorts are gathered up the sides. 

by the end of the thursday session i have finished my garment, im just quite concerned it wont fit a size 12 - i make a note to raise this issue in my toile review. i gathered the side seams on the shorts just using a needle and thread but come friday when i put the jumpsuit on a dummy to sort out the taped on style lines i rip all the stitching up the side so i have to rush to machine stich it all.

thankfully Emily had sorted the models. her friend from work whose about 5ft10" and a size 8 bought along her friend whose also about the same size so we had 2 of them. problem was my girl was a size 8 - and the jumpsuit fit her perfectly but it has to fit a size 12. in the toile review i raised this with Pat who has told me to add 5cm to the length of the garment, which should solve the problem! 

Az wasn't to happy about the fact that i'd bought my fabric already but i explained it was the only chance i would have. what i needed to have done was extensive fabric research and bought a load of swatches to the toile review for them to pick, but this is something i will know for next year. 

originally i wanted to make trousers/leggings out of the velvet but because my jumpsuit was so tight i figured they wouldn't fit underneath. so in my toile review i suggested the velvet could be used for the side panels but i can't because the velvet doesn't stretch. so im going to be using it for the waist belt.

overall i was quite happy with my toile review. there are a few changes i need to make to the original pattern but i feel more prepared and confident with what i need to do to complete my project now.

I was staying with Ivy, Grace and Emily in a hotel called the Leisure Inn which was just off the road running along the north top of Hyde Park. Emily and Grace drove up with Steph whilst me and Ivy took the coach. we had a nightmare time lugging our 2 huge cases up and down the stairs and the different tube stations - and in friday rush hour! not a good start! we were relieved to get to the hotel - although we had received a text from emily and grace saying they thought there was a mouse tap in our hotel room...and it turns out that yes there really was!

the room was quite nice - minus the rat traps... it was dead small though, not really enough room for 4 girls and more importantly 4 suitcases! we just kept all our stuff in the cases all week because there was no where to put anything! but it was alright - one extremely odd thing about the hotel is they did absolutely no food except cereal (well apparently they did cereal, although we never actually saw this complementary 'breakfast') so friday evening we headed to Covent Garden to get some food - me and ivy on our £36(!!!!) tube pass...yeah we bought the wrong one, turns out we could go as far as essex on our pass - the furthest we went was Covent Garden! we met up with steph and her friend for a really nice meal at some italian place(this was to be the only decent meal i ate ALL week!)

Saturday morning me and Ivy had to be at the science museum for 6.30. i hate mornings! infact we both hate mornings...but this morning was extremely horrible. we decided to leave at 5.30 so we wouldn't be late. yesterday me emily and grace had walked the route through hyde park we needed to take to see how long it would be - about 25 minuets. well me and ivy being the genius' we are figured that we'd be able to take this route. well no. not at 5.30 in the morning. Hyde park has no lampost's and 5.30am is really dark - who knew!?! so....we walked the entire way around Hyde park took us nearly an hour!! by which time my feet already had blisters!!!! 

we met the doll team they all seemed really nice, and group A which we were in contained all AIB students so we knew everyone. well actually bar a handful off people all the dressers and front of house crew were AIB students! we spent the whole day carrying stuff and setting up, and waiting around extremely bored. not going to lie....it was terrible. beyond bored most of the time! i text my mum "status: bored to death" i kind of dreaded the entire week was going to consist of hanging around not doing anything like this! and my feet were killing me. i covered both feet in plasters and blister stickers but they were just getting worse, which also mad me dread the rest of the week. me and ivy were done for the day - just as grace and emily started their shift. we should have lied and said the day had been great but we didn't! we told them the full works...so they weren't really looking forward to it. turns out they actually ended up having a worse first day than us! they stood greeting people for 9 hours with only a 20 minute break!

Grace outside the entrance armed with umbrella and extremely fetching lab coat!

was relieved to get back to the hotel. sorted what i was going to wear sunday, had an apple for tea and went to bed.

Sunday morning. didn't have to been in until 7.30 so left 6.45am it was light enough to walk through hyde park this time so that was an improvement on yesterday. today was our busiest day we had 2 shows - Falguni and Shane peacock and Krystof Strozyna.

Falguni & Shane Peacock:

this is Ksenia the model i dressed. 

she was lovely. really shy really young but very polite and quite chatty by the end of the show. i do have a new found respect for models. the girls were there about an hour before we turned up. when i got there at about 7.00am kesnia had been in makeup for about half an hour already, and the make-up artist had just started her eye make-up....45 minutes later he finally finished!!!!! we then went into fitting, and the dressers ksenia had to wear were gorgeous, absolutly amazing, in fact every thing in the show was. they are stunning designers. ksenia was worried about her shoes - they were two sizes too big so whilst she got her hair done i sorted the hoes stuffing them with a ton of tissue paper! we got to see the model walk through - how they walk in the shoes they are giving is anyones guess! but they all walked perfect!

Showtime! nearly lost ksenia! she'd been trying to sneak out for a cigarette all morning but there wasn't anytime! got her changed into the first outfit - then they added tights to her second outfit meaning our change over wasn't quite as easy as i first though. the shows go so quick, they are such a crazy rush, but its absolutely brilliant. the models are all really nice and they really help you out. first show went really well, and was really professional and extremely well organised.

Krystof Strozyna:

second show was an absolute nightmare!!! krystof strozyna's team turned up with only half the shows need. meaning the models had to switch shoes with each other. nightmare. backstage is crazy enough without having to switch stuff over. instead of being issued with a model me and jennie where put on shoes. so we had a list of models names and shoes we had to switch - sounds easy - in practice it just didn't work!!! it wasn't like these shoes were easy shoes either! they had 2 straps with buckles and loads of the buckles were already broken!

 so showtime fell apart. me and jennie were sorted we knew the models we'd gone through it, we knew what we were doing. but come showtime other people decided to "help". some of the other dressers were taking shoes of off their model and giving them to completely different models - with different shoe sizes! and so right from the off it screwed up. in the words of ivys model(who nearly fell because her shoes were far too big) "that show was a f*cking mess!" and she didn't care who heard! but she was right, it was. firstly they should have had more shoes, secondly they need to slow down the walk but they insisted on cranking up the speed after walk through! thirdly they were completely disorganized not only did they not have enough shoes but it was only when they got to the venue that they sorted out who was going to wear which shoes and found out that half the shoes were broken! the runway ended up being completely empty at one point and they put 2 models on twice in the same outfit because no-one else was ready!  but Krystof the design - who was an absolute sweetheart, he spoke to all of us, was really friendly and was doing all the shit jobs himself - like steaming and pressing all the garments, discussing each garment with the dressers, apologizing about the shoes!!! he was really sweet, and seemed extremely relieved when it was all over!

Day 3: Pam Hogg show today.

i knew nothing about Pam Hogg until i got home and googled her but shes no amateur, she got a degree in textiles back in the 80's and her designs were quite renowned back then but she hadn't produced a collection for well over a decade so this was her big come back show.  she was described to me by one of the backstage crew as "an 80's socialite who designed weird shit, and then decided it was much cooler to be a rockstar and so moved on to recording weird shit!" so i was thinking "paris hilton in 20years time" but she was more "lily allen in 20 years" which is slightly more stable. but yeah i really quite liked her. she was totally out there, swore like you wouldn't believe but she was really nice, in fact probably the nicest designer of the whole week. her staff were rude and full of themselves but she was really appreciative and thanked us all before the show, during the show and apologized for shouting afterwards! 

Sugababes!!! well 2/3 of them. didn't see them but they were still there!!!

Gok Wan!!! yeah didn't see him neither! Johanna, Grace and Emily did though , johanna even spoke to him but soo didn't appreciate it - she had no clue who he was!lol! 

we had been told the day before that some famous people might be modeling for her but we didn't know who to expect. we heard a rumor that Peaches Geldof was going to be one of them...thankfully that turned out to be false and we only had to put up with the pouty madam after the show when she strutted backstage and scowled at everyone! 

Peaches Geldof saw her -  she pouted. lots.

the 3 famous girls modeling were Daisy Lowe, Alice Dellal and Jamie Winston. i got to dress Alice. now to be honest i was absolutely freaked by alice. Shes a tough looking girl but looks really are deceiving (so maybe old peaches isn't as vacant and ridiculous as she appeared!) alice was really sweet, funny and proper chilled out. she did go missing for 10 minutes just before walk through but we found her just in time!

^ that was the first outfit alice wore. when we were putting on the catsuits we had to hold them at the wist as they were pulled up over the shoulder to stop them tearing....we had no fitting so i was terrified i was going to be the one to tear it. 

^ this was literally finished 2 minutes before she walked out. infact the shoulder section was just pinted together and needles were still hanging from it! and the head thing was modeledand made on susan's head about 10 minutes before showtime!

apart from the fact that quite a few of the garments still had pins in them and needles dangling from them the dressing for the Pam Hogg show went really smooth. she had tons of models so everyones change-over was quite spaced.  Backstage after the show was crazy. the whole dressing area was filled with a swarm of people congratulating her or interviewing. she really is a popular lady!

Ashley Isham:

Last day and we have ashley isham. i was really excited about today because i had read up on ashley isham and recognized some of his previous work. his whole collection was lovely really nice, very detailed, some heavily embellished and using gorgeous rich colours.

^ Check out their really tall hair. we had to put polo necks on them. not really appropriate hair for polo necks!!!

the show was extremely well organised, probably more so than the falguni and shane peacock show! he had tons of little old ladies working for him, so it meant we spent most of the morning just siting around not doing anything! i was lucky enough to be paired with my first model again as ksenia was due back for this show. 

we had no pre-show fitting and i was quite apprehensive about it because my second garment was a huge dress with a really long train and all one of the old ladies kept saying to me was "be careful with this, be really careful. it rips, the trains only pinned, she can only step in backwards and then it twists up over the body, the strap breaks really easy, its incredibly tight but you have to zip it all the way....." my head was spinning by showtime! but it went really well, ksenia helped with the dress - and we did nearly rip it but we got it done eventually! 

Ashley Isham was a really nice guy and his stylist was also really cool. during the week we all found that the designers tended to be the nicest out of all of them, it was their staff who were awful. but the Ashley Isham show was really nice. they were all really polite and appreciative towards the dressers and they let us all keep our model picture cards as a nice little momentum! 

the dress pictured below was absolutely stunning! it had these huge flower cut-out sequined things all over them, all the reporters and fashion people who came backstage just wanted to see this dress up closer it was amazing!!

Front Row:

the Ashley Isham show attracted the most celebs pictured here is Camilla Rutherford, Jade Parfitt, Jasmin Guinness, Beverley Knight, Tess Daly, Camilla Johnson-Hill and Erin O'Connor!!!

we finished by lunchtime so i caught the tube to oxford street, bought a load of stuff, which bearing in mind i could barely shut my suitcase with the clothes id brought from home was not really the most genius idea!!! 

i also went and bought my fabirc for my final project. it was a bit of a risk because my toile review isn't until next week but this was the only chance id have to source in london. i got a gorgeous silk cotton jersey in a charcoal grey with a thin silver running through it. and a crushed velvet which doesn't stretch which im hoping to use in the panelling on the jumpsuit or as the belt. 

we had to go back in the evening to de-rig. thankfully it was alot quicker to take down than put up!!! we managed to get some nice freebies at the end of it, and we could take as much of the limited edition Jean Paul Gaultier water which we'd all been eyeing up all week! apparently they were going for £50 on Ebay! i got 3 bottles, ivy and philipa took a case each - 12 bottles! which they then had to lug around for the rest of the evening!lol! finished about 10.30pm we were absolutely exhausted but even more hungry so we managed to pursued a lovely little italian man to keep his restaurant open and cook all 8 of us a pizza - his staff didn't seem to happy about it though! we left them with a Jean Paul Gaultier bottle and told him to flog it on Ebay so he seemed quite chuffed in the end!

over all i had an absolutely amazing time, it was a fantastic experience and im hoping i will be able to work clothes show london and make this plus that my work experience placement. was absolutly shattered at the end of it but it was all worth it - blisters and all! 

♥jenelle♥